The silence after my stories was companionable. But the practical problem remained. Stories weren't enough. I needed something to grow. Something to care for. A project.
I sat up, cross-legged on my bouncy, murmuring pillow. "Staust," I announced. "Show me what we can buy for the garden. For our 110,000 Bubblepoints."
The blue pane materialized before me, serene and official. A menu unfolded, pearly text scrolling.
[AVAILABLE PURCHASES - HABITAT ENRICHMENT TIER 1]
[AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED: OWNER (C'THULLUS THE EVER-HUNGERING)]
I scowled. Right. Mr. Fin held the purse strings. I turned my best pleading look on the distant shark. "Mr. Fiiin? Can we look? Pleeease? Just looking!"
His dorsal fin gave one definitive twitch: No.
I pouted. "But it's our garden! I did the cooking! I got the grade! Well, the D-minus. But I got the points!"
A low rumble traveled through the floor. It wasn't a word, but a sensation of profound, cosmic reluctance. Then, with a sound like a great, rusty lock turning, STAUST's display changed. The [AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED] line blinked out. In its place appeared:
[TEMPORARY BROWSING PERMISSION GRANTED. USER: CHIARI. DURATION: 10 MINUTES.]
"Thank you!" I chirped, diving into the catalog.
It was bewildering. The items weren't just listed; they were demonstrated in tiny, holographic simulations.
[BASIC SOIL LAYER (NON-NUTRITIVE): 10,000 BP]
The holo showed grey dust settling over a patch of floor. It looked… like slightly finer grey dust.
"Adds minimal loft. Will not sustain carbon-based life. Primarily aesthetic."
[PRIMORDIAL WATER CYCLE: 5,000 BP]
A tiny, shimmering loop appeared—a droplet forming from mist, falling, evaporating. It was pretty.
"Recirculates existing ambient brine. Does not purify. May increase local humidity by up to 3%."
[PHOTOSYNTHETIC LICHEN COLONY (GLOW-VARIANT): 8,000 BP]
A patch of eerie, blue-white lichen spread across a rock, glowing faintly.
"Derives energy from ambient regret-spectrum light. Inedible. Possibly mildly hypnotic."
I scrolled, my nose almost touching the hologram. Then I saw it.
[ENGINEERED ABYSSAL WHEAT SAPLING: 7,500 BP]
The simulation showed a single, slender stalk pushing up from the grey. It was black, etched with silver veins, and its single seed head pulsed with a soft, platinum light.
"Low-yield. Grains require significant emotional processing to be rendered digestible. Drought-tolerant (brine-based)."
My heart leapt. "Wheat! We can make bread! Mr. Fin, look! Wheat!"
His only response was a deeper, more resonant hum from the floor. A warning.
I kept scrolling, faster now. Melons. I wanted melons. Sweet, juicy…
[FRUIT-BEARING FLORA: UNAVAILABLE.]
[REASON: INSUFFICIENT PHOTOSYNTHETIC INFRASTRUCTURE. INCOMPATIBLE SUBSTRATE.]
I glared at the STAUST pane. "Melons," I stated.
The text glitched.
[MELON-TREE SYNTHESIS PACKAGE: 55,000 BP]
The holo that appeared was… bizarre. It showed a gnarled, mangrove-like trunk growing directly out of a brine pool. From its branches hung not leaves, but small, shimmering, translucent orbs that looked like trapped bubbles of honeydew.
"Advanced purchase. Requires Basic Soil Layer & Primordial Water Cycle as prerequisites. Fruit is hyper-saturated with nostalgic sugars. Consumption may cause vivid, non-linear time perception."
A melon tree. I giggled. That was perfect. Impossible and perfect.
I tapped my foot on the floor, thinking. The math danced in my head. Soil, Water, Wheat, Melon-Tree… it was a lot. I looked over my shoulder at Mr. Fin's immense shadow, cast long by the rice-grain light.
"Mr. Fin," I said, my voice shifting to a tone of serious negotiation I didn't know I had. "We need to invest. In our future. In better ingredients."
I saw the reflection of STAUST's screen in his obsidian scales. The numbers glimmered there. I saw his dorsal fin tilt, just a degree. A calculation was happening in that cosmic mind.
A new line appeared on STAUST, in a font that seemed heavier, final:
[PURCHASE ORDER QUEUED. AWAITING OWNER CONFIRMATION.]
[ITEMS: BASIC SOIL LAYER (10,000 BP), PRIMORDIAL WATER CYCLE (5,000 BP), ENGINEERED ABYSSAL WHEAT SAPLING (7,500 BP), MANGROVE MELON-TREE SYNTHESIS (55,000 BP)]
[TOTAL: 77,500 BP]
I held my breath. The bubble hummed. Proti quivered.
From the darkness, a single, sharp click echoed, like the sound of a vault closing in reverse.
[PURCHASE CONFIRMED.]
[DEBITTING ACCOUNT...]
[REMAINING BP: 32,500]
And then, the Brine-Seeded Expansion began to change.
It started with a deep, grinding tremble. The grey, rocky floor in a wide circle around my nest began to shimmer. It wasn't an light—it was the surface becoming unstable, granular. Then, from nowhere and everywhere, a fine, ochre-tinted dust began to sift down, a silent, perpetual rain. It settled over the jagged membrane, softening its edges, filling its pores. The Basic Soil Layer. It didn't smell like earth. It smelled like powdered pottery and forgotten attics.
Next, the air itself thickened. The fine mist rising from the brine puddles began to move, caught in an invisible current. It streamed toward the center of the newly soiled area, coalescing into a shimmering, vertical ring of mist—a ghostly, miniature weather system about as tall as I was. The Primordial Water Cycle. A single, heavy droplet condensed at its top and fell with a soft plink into a small, newly formed depression in the soil. The droplet didn't soak in; it beaded, rolling like mercury before slowly evaporating back into the mist. The humidity ticked up, tasting of stale rain on concrete.
Then, from the spot where the droplet had fallen, something pushed up.
A crack in the soft soil. A sliver of darkness. It grew, rising in a slow, deliberate curl. The Engineered Abyssal Wheat Sapling. It was a whip of deepest black, its surface not smooth but etched with a filigree of glowing silver lines, like circuitry or frozen lightning. At its tip, a single, slender seed head formed, a cluster of tiny, obsidian kernels each capped with a point of platinum light. It stood alone, a solemn, beautiful alien sentinel in the ochre dust.
Finally, the grand event. At the edge of the soil circle, where a larger brine puddle lay, the liquid began to churn. The fractal patterns on its surface shattered. From the depths, a shape erupted. Not with a splash, but with a wet, woody groan.
The Mangrove Melon-Tree.
It was a mess of thick, corkscrewing roots, pale and slick like bone, that clawed their way out of the brine and dug into the soft soil. The trunk that followed was twisted, covered in a bark that looked like layers of compressed, fossilized seaweed. It grew to about twice my height and stopped. From its few, stunted branches, no leaves sprouted. Instead, delicate, vein-like filaments extended, and at their tips, they began to inflate.
Round, translucent sacs swelled into being. They were the size of my fist, glowing with a soft, internal, honey-colored light. Inside each, shadowy seeds floated lazily. They looked less like fruit and more like lanterns containing captured summer evenings. They were beautiful and deeply, deeply wrong.
I was on my feet, breathless, spinning in a circle. "We have a garden! A real garden!"
I ran to the wheat sapling first, my feet leaving deep prints in the strange soil. I reached out, my finger hovering just before touching one of the platinum-tipped kernels.
Flicker.
The sapling… wasn't there. My finger poked empty air.
I blinked. It was back. Solid. Real.
I tried again, slower.
Flicker-flicker. It vanished and reappeared two feet to the left, then back in its original spot. It wasn't moving. It was phasing, its existence uncertain, tied to some unstable metric of the new soil.
Giggling nervously, I turned to the melon-tree. I counted the glowing orbs. One, two, three… seven… twelve… thirty? I blinked, my eyes losing focus. The number wouldn't hold. Sometimes the branches seemed sparse with a dozen fruit. Sometimes they were thickly clustered with hundreds, the tree groaning under a luminous, impossible weight. It made me dizzy. I stopped counting.
Instead, I went to the strange, misty ring of the water cycle. I reached in. The mist was cold and left a gritty, saline residue on my skin. The single droplet forming at the top plinked onto my forehead. It was so cold it burned for a second.
Everything was new. Everything was unstable. Everything was mine.
I ran back to my jellyfish-bed and flopped onto it. It jiggled wildly, the screaming faces in the foam churning. "It's bouncy!" I laughed, bouncing deliberately. "Mr. Fin! Look! We have trees! And wheat! Next we'll grow… potatoes! And carrots! And a big pumpkin!"
STAUST's pane, hovering nearby, flickered politely.
[BOTANICAL NOTE: ROOT VEGETABLES ARE NOT ADVISED. SUBSTRATE LACKS BIOLOGICAL DECOMPOSERS. RESULTS WOULD BE… GEOMETRIC.]
I stuck my tongue out at it. STAUST didn't understand vision.
I lay back, looking at my impossible garden. The black wheat flickered in and out of reality. The melon-tree's fruit count refused to be pinned down. The mist cycled its single, eternal drop. The soil was dust that remembered being something else.
It was the most beautiful, terrifying, hopeful thing I had ever seen.
Proti oozed over to the wheat sapling and gently wrapped a pseudopod around its base, as if to steady it. The flickering slowed, but didn't stop.
Mr. Fin, from his distant post, let out a long, slow exhalation of bubbles that drifted across the chamber, each one reflecting the faint, honey-glow of the melons before popping with a sound like a sigh.
We had spent our wealth. We had changed our world.
Now, we waited to see what would grow.